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unspeakablehorrorThere are so many times I think about what it would take for me to have a 'healthy' amount of anxiety, and unfortunately I suspect the answer might be 'the universe operating in a fundamentally different way than reality dictates'. Because my personality is very much dominated by fear, but I suspect it's not at all entirely baseless.
And this is one of those areas where my philosophy diverges from what I see as a prevailing attitude toward mental health. That prevailing attitude being that the solution to having too much of a negative emotion is always to just take an approach of 'fixing' the person having that negative emotion, with the assumption that just because that amount of emotion may be causing harm in some respect, that it's irrational, and that it couldn't possibly be adaptive in some *other* respect.
For me, I see my anxiety as something that I must confront, not to entirely dismiss outright, but to reassess. There's no doubt to me that even if my fear is responding to the realities of the world rather than imagined phantoms (which I think is certainly not always the case), it doesn't necessarily do so in a way that is helpful to me. How I can deal with my fears, whether they be real or imagined, is not always clear to me, but it is in my nature to try to pick at problems no matter how intractable they may seem, and I've found that sometimes that persistence itself is of value.
I think that too often the analysis of fear doesn't take into account the environment, which dictates a lot about the consequences of our behavior. Even how unrealistic or realistic a fear is varies widely from person to person, often with the variation between their environments. For example: is an old person very rich and/or occupies a high position in society? Then maybe they can completely afford to ignore the existence of covid-19 and still likely live after they almost invariably catch it as a result. But if a person of the same age or younger is poor? Then the risk the virus presents to them is considerably more devastating. For example: is a person widely-liked and well connected? Then they can expect a very different reception to their more unconventional ideas than someone with few social connections.
I just think this is an oft-neglected aspect of managing mental health that's responsible for a lot of useless advice that's given. And that advice can be based on a completely accurate assessment of what worked for some person, but be completely unworkable when the person who it's being given to is not operating from the same context as the one the advice is based on.
And this is one of those areas where my philosophy diverges from what I see as a prevailing attitude toward mental health. That prevailing attitude being that the solution to having too much of a negative emotion is always to just take an approach of 'fixing' the person having that negative emotion, with the assumption that just because that amount of emotion may be causing harm in some respect, that it's irrational, and that it couldn't possibly be adaptive in some *other* respect.
For me, I see my anxiety as something that I must confront, not to entirely dismiss outright, but to reassess. There's no doubt to me that even if my fear is responding to the realities of the world rather than imagined phantoms (which I think is certainly not always the case), it doesn't necessarily do so in a way that is helpful to me. How I can deal with my fears, whether they be real or imagined, is not always clear to me, but it is in my nature to try to pick at problems no matter how intractable they may seem, and I've found that sometimes that persistence itself is of value.
I think that too often the analysis of fear doesn't take into account the environment, which dictates a lot about the consequences of our behavior. Even how unrealistic or realistic a fear is varies widely from person to person, often with the variation between their environments. For example: is an old person very rich and/or occupies a high position in society? Then maybe they can completely afford to ignore the existence of covid-19 and still likely live after they almost invariably catch it as a result. But if a person of the same age or younger is poor? Then the risk the virus presents to them is considerably more devastating. For example: is a person widely-liked and well connected? Then they can expect a very different reception to their more unconventional ideas than someone with few social connections.
I just think this is an oft-neglected aspect of managing mental health that's responsible for a lot of useless advice that's given. And that advice can be based on a completely accurate assessment of what worked for some person, but be completely unworkable when the person who it's being given to is not operating from the same context as the one the advice is based on.